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High performance, low power consumption options?

Looking at CPU specs these days it seems pretty hard to discern one from another in power consumption, performance & chipset terms, so I'm hoping for some advice as to CPU and motherboard options I can consider for an upgrade...details below.

Basic requirements:
- high performance when under load, very little power consumption when idling
- (5 or more) 2TB low power hard drives attached
- drives will be spun down when Idle for 5 mins or more, PC ideally into sleep mode
- will run headless
- Activity on NIC must awaken PC from sleep mode
- PC's only purpose is to run Squeezeboxserver & MusicIP and to serve video, photos and documents to HTPC/AV/HDTV
- Music collection is in the region of 12-15k albums
- will be connected to gigabit LAN via CAT6
- no RAID or other storage schemes - just straight SATA connections with each drive being an independent unit.

Any ideas as to suitable CPU & mobo combinations appreciated - would prefer to build my own pc rather than buy something that's pre-built.

How many old SBes do you intend to serve simultaneously with 24/96 files?
As for video transcoding, whether you really need it depends very much on the file types you want to play and on the media renderers you have to serve. Modern HTPCs and NMTs play almost everything, while the integrated media players of current BD disc players or televisions might still have problems with 1080p files.

A dual-core Atom based board (D510 or D525 currently) is typically the answer for a low power consuming platform with a fair amount of computing power. The trouble with most, though, is that the standard Intel chipsets for the Atom only support two SATA ports. So your five or more disk drive requirement could be the sticking point.

There are a few server-class Atom boards, especially those from SuperMicro, that use a different chipset with Atom CPUs and give more SATA ports. They're a little pricey, though, and probably nowhere near as low in power consumption.

AMD has just come out with their Brazos platform (the dual core CPU is the Zacate E-350) to compete with Intel's Atom. Comparable in CPU power, slightly higher power consumption, but much better video (for HTPC applications). Motherboards are just starting to hit the market.

I dug out the killawatt and looked at the power consumption of my new development rig, a cheap performance machine:
- micro-atx Gigabyte GA-880GM-UD2H
- 6-core 3GHz AMD Phenom II X6 1075T
- 400W PSU
- 1 power-hungry (ex-server) 3"5 SATA drive, ~ 15Wh when active
Now this is some very affordable and serious performance. It can handle quite bit of RAM too and support a few virtual machines if I need, so packing this much peak power is not totally absurd.

Unfortunately, under the killawatt it doesn't look too good: 11W in soft off (doh!), 80W idling with the drive spinning and all 6 cores clocked-down to 800MHz (under ubuntu). I couldn't test under full load but surely it will be in the 200W.
So obviously you do not want one of these… (I'm a bit disappointed myself by the idle and soft off values.)

2TB drives of the green type will eat 7W each (minimum) when spinning and if you spindown after 5 minutes, you're going to kill your drives swiftly. 15-20 minutes seems a more reasonable value.
The only way you can halve the drives power requirement and play with a 5 minute timeout value is using 2'5 drives designed for laptop use. But you won't get 2 TB.

Assuming energy use is a major concern, and if you can really control which drives are spinning, it would make sense to place the audio library on a smaller 2.5" drive. Also, keep the OS and applications on some type of solid state device like SSD or USB flash.

Unfortunately, under the killawatt it doesn't look too good: 11W in soft off (doh!), 80W idling with the drive spinning and all 6 cores clocked-down to 800MHz (under ubuntu). I couldn't test under full load but surely it will be in the 200W.

It does not sound to bad; at least it is better than my similar setup... even with your hungry SATA drive.

Asus M4A87TD/USB3 with a 1055 and 8 GB memory.
A vertex2 SSD for system drive, a 2.5" 500GB for data and a 1 TB WD10EADS for media

I think my soft off is 6W.

When I put it together I had a Chill Innovation CP520 PSU and a ATI-4850 graphics from my old rig and my total idle (800 MHz) was 135W; I shifted to a ATI-6850 and it dropped to 94W.